dreams schemes and flying machines

(Excerpt from beginning of story)

PROLOGUE

I first got a sense of myself at about age 4 or 5.

It is a late summer afternoon and I am standing on the front porch of our house, waving goodbye. The porch is a square space made of stucco with a grey wood floor attached to the bungalow. The porch is always empty, not even a swing. My family is in our car. My Dad is driving and Mom is sitting next to him. I can see my brother and sister in the back seat of the car as it leaves the driveway. My brother, looking out the back window of the car, waves to me. It is not an enthusiastic wave of the hand, rather more of an acknowledgement. No one seems happy. My mother, sitting next to Dad, seems hidden. I sense she is stiff and uncaring, her eyes looking forward.

As the car pulls away and drives off down the street I turn and go inside. I am left with the babysitter. I feel hurt and punished. I am not allowed to go with them because I have done something naughty. I am not crying but there is a marble in my throat that refuses to roll.

Mother makes it clear in my baby book that I had a temper. Maybe I am made to stay home because I argued with my brother. I adore my brother and was always happy when he played with me. I remember we played together with my dolls. I had the big doll named Betsy. She was half my size she was so big. Her head had painted hair and she had a smile and dimples. My brother played with a smaller doll named Lucy. She had a real feeling body with real hair, red and curly and was dressed in a fluffy blue dress. I guess I ruined it by getting bossy and telling my brother he shouldn’t put the baby to bed. He disagreed with me and put Lucy to bed anyway. I remember being angry with him. He refused to play with me any longer and walks away.

Mother makes me sit down in front of the record player and listen to a record called “Manners”. I hate this record and cover my ears in protest. I feel punished , naughty. My brother walks past me sitting on the floor and laughs at me. A knot in my stomach forms like a coiled snake about to attack.

As I remember this time I wonder if there is anger buried in my 4 year old heart. Or maybe the little girl that was me just feels left out and not good enough.

It becomes clear to me years later that whenever someone would make me feel less than or cut off, that feeling of being pushed aside and left out presented itself. A small light illuminates the child waving goodbye to her brother. The light also encircles the child listening to the record. The child becomes more vivid and reachable. I can tentatively reach out and touch the child, who turns and with tears in her eyes says, “I’m not angry, I am afraid”.

I always hug the child and say, “so am I, but I will take care of you”.

Certainly that is how I felt years later when my marriage had ended, the airplanes had gone and I found myself stranded in Hawaii.

Part I: 1983

The yard is neat and trim, a sprinkler circulating water like a merry go round. This is a place that offers respite and great contentment. I have now been here a year.

This Alahaki Street backyard is a true wonder. To my left I can see the banana tree in front of a side fence. The fence runs along a canal is adorned with a gorgeous passion fruit vine, sweating with life. In the far left corner a strand of bamboo adds mystery and romance, knocking around in the wind like an Asian god. Fronting the bamboo, and dominant in the yards, is the royal mango tree. On this particular late afternoon, the tree is pregnant with fruit, colored golden green and a bright bluish rose. The tree offers her fruit from branches that hang low, well within reach.

Following my gaze along the back fence I find the lime tree and next to it a plumeria tree. Next in view is an abundant orange tree, literally the sweetest of all and the crown jewel of the yard, It swells and bends in December, just in time to fill hanging holiday stockings. This fruit tree is know and sought out by every child surrounding my new little house. They knock on my front door and ask so nicely if they can pick an orange. “Of course” I always answer.

Finally, tucked in the right hand corner of the yard is a true treasure. Beginning in May my heart stops as I watch for the first specks of white. As they grow bigger, I eagerly pluck the precious blossoms of gardenia. Each sweet smelling gentle flower says I love you and then quickly dies.

Another plumeria and banana tree round out the edges of this most incredible yard which has witnessed great migrations of turtles and ducks?

In the pacific, where the climate seems like an endless sameness, there are seasons. The flowers and mangos bloom in May and the mango leaves fall in October. Life has ebb and flow the same as anywhere and all is reborn again.

I can clock the year by my Alahaki yard. And just to be able to pluck the flowers and fruit from this little yard I feel rich indeed. Finally I can relax and move forward and take that fearful child with me.

Part II: 1968 – 1982

Chapter 1: Denver

He talked so fast I could barely understand what he was saying. He was much too taken with himself. He was amusing though. Most of all he was a friend of my brother. He had come all the way to Colorado to see me. He had called long distance to tell her that he would be stopping over in Denver on his return from Samoa. He lived in Washington D.C.

“Can you meet me at the airport? “, he wanted to know.

“Why not meet him?” I thought. My brother spoke highly of him. I was curious.

“How will I know what you look like?” he asked me.

“I’ll be wearing a green coat”, I answered. “And you?”

“A tan coat”, he replied.

I easily spotted the tan coat and was pleasantly surprised at the contents. I had assumed that George was much older. He was older, square chinned with dark thick hair and thin lips. But he certainly seemed an acceptable age and kind of cute. He bounded off the plane.

“Let’s drive up to the mountains. It’s been a long time since I have seen the Rockies”, was the first thing he said. They drove her black Volkswagen up to a small town more in the foothills than the mountains. “My uncle worked on the Union Pacific Railroad and one summer, when I was sixteen, I spent the summer with him. He got me a job and I traveled the railroad throughout the Colorado Mountains”, he explained.

“What did you like about it”, I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe because I was able to get away from family and explore a new part of the world”, he replied. “I grew up in outside of Chicago. There were six of us kids. I was the second after my sister and then they just kept coming, two brothers, another sister and then the youngest, Danny. After Danny was born things just sort of fell apart. I’ll never forget Mom rousing me from sleep one night. She was pretty upset. She made me get in the car with her and we drove around the city looking for my dad. She seemed to know the places to look and we found him. He was at the apartment of his secretary. It was a pretty big deal for a 10 yr old.”

“What did she do?” I asked.

“Well the next morning she gathered us all around and told us never to speak about Dad again. As far as we are concerned he is dead.”

Aghast all I could say was, “Really?”

“Yeah”, he replied. “And we never did talk about him. We never saw him again. It was forbidden. Danny was only about 2”

We drove back down to the city, bought an ice cream cone and ended up in City Park sitting on the grass, chatting. All the while George was nonstop talking. He was witty and entertaining. He had traveled extensively and had experienced some very unique situations.

“How did you end up in Samoa of all places”? She was curious.

“Actually I traveled there after the 1964 election. I had just given my all to the Barry Goldwater campaign. I was drained. My mother owned a travel agency in Chicago at the time. I asked her to get me a ticket to the southernmost point in America. That’s Pago Pago”, he explained.

Arriving in Pago on a Pan American jet from Honolulu, George decided to take a trip into town. He told the following story.

“I thought the plane stayed on the ground for the day and then returned to Honolulu later that night. I figured I had a whole day to explore. Turns out the plane only landed for a couple of hours and then did a quick turnaround back to Honolulu. I was stranded there for a week”, he laughed.

“What did you do?” I asked, not believing that he didn’t know ahead of time that Pan Am only flew to Pago once a week. But it made a good story and an even better story about what happened in that week.

Stuck on the island for the week, George heard about a guy that had been thrown in jail by the then territorial governor, John Hayden. Hayden, a self confident, hyperactive administrator, described as frequently shooting from the hip, was from Seattle serving for the last four years.  Later I always referred to this story as George arriving in Pago, riding his white horse into town just in time to help Jake out. Jake King was the poor guy in jail. In the Rainmaker bar on a breezy South Pacific evening, Jake got into a heated discussion about John Hayden. Jake of course was adamant that Hayden was probably the worse administrator in the history of government. He landed in the Pago jail. George was able to get him released only to tangle with Hayden later over unpaid income taxes. But that’s another story. And many airplanes later.

Chapter 2: Washington D.C.

I couldn’t wait to drive away from Denver. Nothing was happening in the city in those days. I had interviewed for a teaching job and secured a position at Belt Junior High in Montgomery County,  north of Washington D.C.,  teaching 9th grade Geography.

I drove from Colorado to DC in my little black Volkswagen in the summer of 1967. It was a very big deal. As I pulled out of the driveway, my brother stopped me. “Here”, he smiled, “just in case you run across any trouble”. He handed me a belly club! I tucked it into the glove compartment and left my childhood behind. The trip was all mapped out for me by Triple A. This was before GPS. I had this nifty little packet with progressive maps and notes which I followed along the entire route. I remember thinking as I traveled further and further East how the buildings got increasingly older and older. It was an uneventful trip.

I initially lived with a gal I had met in Denver. We shared an apartment in Arlington Virginia.   Washington was a fun city for young people. I eventually moved to Georgetown, traded in the Volkswagen for a little yellow MG convertible and started to date George exclusively.

I remember one morning, while I was getting dressed for work, there were bits and pieces of a story on the radio. I wasn’t paying too much attention. I heard the name Kennedy and thought to myself, “Why are they talking about the assassination. It was 5 years ago!!” It became clear as I listened closer that this was a report on another Kennedy assassination. Bobby Kennedy had been shot in a hotel in Los Angeles. Two months previous Martin Luther King had been shot in Memphis, Tennessee and we endured the reaction in the streets of northwest Washington DC.

“My god,” I remember thinking, “how much more can we take.”

During those six days of rioting,  I was initially able to cross the Potomac River into the city using the Key Bridge from Rosslyn. By then George and I were dating. He lived near Capitol Hill very close to Union Station and I would drive into the city to see him.

We drove through the city and were in awe, “This is truly something to see,” George exclaimed, “we are seeing tanks on the streets of the capitol of the United States”. It was a sight I would never forget. There in front of us were heavily armored vehicles on Massachusetts Avenue. I remember the soldiers wore white gloves!

By the weekend the bridges were closed into the city. I could not get into the city and George could not get over to Arlington for the whole weekend. On Saturday I talked to George by phone and asked what he had done the night before.

I was dumbfounded when he said, “Well, I decided to see what was going on so I walked along 14th street.”

“George!” I exclaimed. “You are a white guy and you just decided to stroll down 14th street in the middle of a riot.”

“Yeah”, he answered. “It was a little tense but no one seemed to notice me.” This, I was learning,  was a typical George thing to do. As his good friends Tom and John would say, “Leave it to George”, they said.  “Smart guy but just barrels forward without thinking”. Eventually a cop picked him up and drove him out of the area and back to his car. This was all before the airplanes.

A year later I watched as the United States landed the first men on the moon. I sat on the living room floor of my friend Mary’s house in Foggy Bottom. We were enthralled with the event before us on a blurry television screen. This was before computers and CNN.

Chapter 3: The First Machine

I remember the first moment alone in the airplane. It was a sweet little single engine Piper Cherokee 6 and the feeling was magnificent.

“Charlie, this is Bravo 150. Leaving ILS 19. Over & out.” I checked the radio dial and clicked the radio to mute the sound.

“Roger, Bravo 150. Have a good trip”, replied the tower. I wondered if they knew I was a maiden pilot on her first solo flight.

I checked my altimeter and trim. My stomach was flipping and I struggled to keep the fear from bubbling to the brim. Instead I grinned and muttered, “I cannot believe I am doing this.” The thought of being in this machine, alone, in the air almost made me sick to my stomach. “I won’t think about it”, I resolved and immediately turned my attention to my map.

I had studied this map tirelessly for the past five days and knew my next VOR station. I had to concentrate on the time. This enabled me to track my crossing the VOR and confirm the visual checkpoints. VOR to VOR, checking checkpoints I maneuvered the course over the Virginia countryside until I was back in view of the airport with the landing strip below me. “Gulp, I gotta get this baby down in one piece, “I muttered.

Completing the base leg and turning into the direction of the landing I slowly decreased my altitude until I was lined up and ready to take her in. Slowly drawing back on the throttle the speed decreased and soon I was over the pavement and dropped down onto land pulling back hard to come to a stop before the hard ground ran out.

Years later I walked slowly down the old runway, remembering. I smiled, thinking, “I was good that day. What a terrific feeling bringing that airplane back all by myself!” I glanced up as I passed the old brink building, broken windows and graffiti marring the memory.

But my smile broadened as I recalled walking into office after landing.

“Hey, Paulette! Ya did it. And you even kept your wings straight”, yelled Lacy.

I could still see Sonny, my instructor, standing there grinning. Before I knew what was happening someone came up from behind, grabbed my shirt tail, cutting a big round U. Tradition for a new pilot was getting in by your shirttail! Luckily it was not an expensive shirt!

Chapter 4: To Have and To Hold

I was getting antsy. After 2 years of “dating” the relationship wasn’t moving forward. Not really intending to move it in any direction, I decided I had had enough of Washington. I wanted to move on. I started exploring teaching positions in Australia.

“Hey, look at this George”, I proceeded. “Here are responses to my inquiries about teaching positions in New South Wales and Victoria.”

“What? Where?” he asked, surprised. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m getting bogged down at school”, I replied. “I am thinking I need to shake off some boredom and Australia sounds like an adventure. I’m thinking I want an adventure.”

“You haven’t mentioned this before”, he said. “I didn’t realize that you were thinking of doing anything different. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Well, I guess I am telling you now.” He became very quiet and we didn’t mention the subject again.

A couple of weeks later we drove to the Shenandoah National Park to hike. We stopped along a ridge overlooking the Shenandoah Valley. It was a spectacular spot. We sat on a rocky outcrop watching the sun move along the far ridges, dancing in between the clouds. As the shadows crossed the mountains the colors turned from green to a bluish gray.

“Paulette”, he said. “I’ve been thinking. Would you consider a life in the South Pacific an adventure?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Well if we got married I would give up the office in DC and move my practice to Pago. I have plenty of work to do there and I only come back to DC because I have never had a reason to leave. Now maybe I do.”

I said yes on that rocky outcrop and my life took one of those changes in direction that create a part of one’s history. I danced down the mountain. I was very happy but as I looked back to George I felt there was a sense of dread in his demeanor. He didn't seem to be dancing with me.

Chapter 4: Samoa for the First Time

Chapter 5: Aua